Due to their sensitive components, disk drives are vulnerable to externally induced shocks and vibrations. Because magnetic disk drives are predominantly designed for operation in stationary environments, external shock and vibration protection is often required to improve the robustness of disk drives in mobile applications. To fulfill this requirement, protective cases having vibration and shock dampening characteristics are often used to carry and transport small external disk drives.
It is a common practice to provide internal shock and vibration isolation to a portable disk drive encased in a plastic enclosure. Conventionally, elastomeric mounts having various geometric shapes are used to support the disk drive and to provide the necessary shock and vibration isolation within its plastic enclosure. Typically, these elastomeric mounts are often custom-molded to fit the disk drive assembly and the enclosure. However, this results in different elastomeric mount designs and different elastomeric mount supporting structures that are only suitable for a single disk drive model or a small number of disk drive models. Ideally, the elastomeric mount's design should be suitable for a wide variety of models of data storage devices.